Facebook’s next conquest: Kids?

Facebook wants to patent a system for letting children create accounts with parental supervision, a sign that the social network may be moving closer to extending membership to kids under 13.

The patent application, made public Thursday, describes in detail how a child seeking to join Facebook would first have to get a parent’s approval through the parent’s own Facebook account. Parents would then have the option to set privacy controls and to limit and monitor the kinds of content, friends and third-party applications available to the child.

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Facebook currently bans children under 13, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has signaled he’s interested in bringing kids into the fold, a move that could generate millions of new members. Adding children to the social network “will be a fight we take on at some point,” he said in 2011. “My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age.”

A Facebook spokesman said the patent application, while made public for the first time Thursday, was first filed in 2012 and is “not a predictor of future work in this area.”

“Child safety advocates, policymakers and companies have discussed how best to help parents keep their kids safe online. Like any responsible company, we looked at ways to tackle this issue,” the spokesman said.

To expand membership to kids, Facebook would have to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a 1998 law that governs what kind of information companies can collect on kids under 13. The regulations, which were updated last year, require companies to get verified parental consent before collecting or sharing children’s personal information.

The Federal Trade Commission, which enforces COPPA, would likely have to approve any new method for proving a parent’s identity. Other websites and services geared toward children require parents to prove their identity by providing credit card information or faxing ID documents. An FTC spokesman declined to comment on whether Facebook had yet filed a proposal to the agency.

The whole idea of letting kids under 13 onto Facebook may be problematic, said Julia Horowitz, a consumer protection counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group.

“It seems like it’s hard enough for parents to tell kids, ‘Don’t tell strangers what your name is.’ Then you put them in front of a computer, and ask them to make decisions about what information to share,” she said. “That’s an adult level of discretion that’s unreasonable to ask of children.”

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2012 that Facebook was looking at letting children set up accounts with parental supervision, but there’s been no word since then. The company has been criticized over reports that many children under 13 already join Facebook in violation of the company’s ban.

Other efforts to use social media to verify a parent’s identity have not fared well with regulators. Earlier this year, the FTC shot down a proposal for a social media-based parent verification method from the company AssertID. The agency said AssertID hadn’t proved the method was stringent enough to ensure the person providing consent was the child’s parent. Users could “easily fabricate” accounts to dupe such a method, the commissioners wrote.